In the end, there is nothing too paradigm-shifting to be found here, just a nice genre pastiche from two unique talents who won’t disappoint their fans.

He works in a middle ground, neither minimal or elaborate, making strong impressions by getting pushy. That’s what follows seduction.

Bright and Vivid gives little of itself immediately, but unfolds to a much larger extent over time.

Her voice, pure and high with a lemon-y sharp tang, is a mesmerizing thing, all on its own, and more than a conduit for the traditional and original songs she delivers here.

Their 20th album, an absolute hoot of a disc that shows no signs of age or frailty.

In the end, Giving is a more than satisfying swan song for this lineup.

At its best, it's both cathartic and transformative, harnessing the transformative power of empathy to politicize the personal and personalize the political.

Like Bellowing Sun,Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars uses contemporary human tools and voices that refuse to be confined to words to enact sonic ceremonies that celebrate the natural world.

It’s a magnificent mix, of course, and a great summation of everything we came to accept about this group and "encapsulating an era and putting it to rest.” That’s what makes it feel like such a hollow gesture, a pat on the back they deliberately rejected for years.

12 Reasons doesn’t find Coles in poor form, but he’s nowhere near his Fishscale peak, in terms of lyrical depth or the intensity of his delivery.

Maybe it's less dangerous, stoopid and contagious in moments. But for this newest gift, I do feel blessed nonetheless. In the end, I guess this largesse just makes me smile.

There is a lot to like on Sympathy For Life despite its unevenness. Savage A and Brown are acute observers, Savage M and Yeaton a really excellent and versatile rhythm section, the band’s willingness to swing outweighs its misses and when they hit Parquet Courts drop into those dive-y, sweaty clubs we’ve all missed.

High Anxiety is the record that some of us have been waiting for Oozing Wound to make.

Raum shows that they can still make it happen, vast swatches of sound, space and symbol coalescing along paths toward those points in time when Tangerine Dream sounds like no one else.

It is another well-made and executed Califone album, and it stays completely true to their concept. Consistency is underrated.

Carried to Dust represents a refreshing return to eccentricity.

If you're bored with what they do, this won't change your mind, but if you're ready for another round, it's reliably strong stuff.

For the most part, Cannibal Sea differs little from The Long Goodbye: the elements that made that album successful – tight songwriting, precise arrangements and elegant performances – are once again employed with aplomb.

Its mix of absurdist humor, lonely stoner confusion and detached sadness could not be more miserably, cathartically timely (albeit in its own, unboxable way). Smart money says this one only gets better.

Bergsman's new set pieces offer no more lasting sustenance than the harder to resist but hardly nutritious candies from The Concretes' confectionery.

While Pythagorean Dream serves the practical end of giving Chatham something that he can tour from town to town without having to school a new set of musicians for each performance, it’s not a compromise or even a reduction. It’s just one more chance to let him show what’s inside a sound.

In short, they pay the best kind of respect to material they love, finding a way to live inside it and change it and make it breathe.

Little Eden pulls off one of Saloman’s best tricks: the record is unerringly faithful to the Bevis Frond aesthetic, a stable sonic construct for some 35 years, and it’s also cleverly responsive to our collective cultural moment.

Though the album is closed out well enough by the droning “Atomkerne,” it’s “Be a Pattern for the World” that leaves a lasting impression.

Despite the less-successful entries, Saint Dymphna is commendable. There's substantially less chaos and abstractness and more pop quantization, but Gang Gang Dance are still overflowing with ideas.

There’s a calmness, a baroque beauty perhaps, to this mode of singing, but on Paperwork, it’s enmeshed within swiftly moving song structures.

Dead Rider has created a vivid, weird, deeply compelling world on this album, but the band isn’t going to come to you; you have to get on its level.

You get a very empowered, very confident album. Super fun, too.

With The Follower we have the first truly top-tier Field album that seems to draw its energy more from refinement than innovation, from the spin of the wheel rather than the speed of the car.

Musically, Sunbathing Animal is much the same as, but slightly more feral than, Light Up Gold, its two-stepping vamps harder and jitterier, its strangled guitar licks more aggressively atonal.

The 'Line now possess a maturity in their songwriting that most indie-rock stalwarts can only dream of.

You can hear the impact of the pandemic in this latest album from No Age, not in the recording, which sounds as assured as ever, but in the bouts of introspection, the intervals of lyricism, the sweet haze and jangle of home-cooked rock. Spunt and Randall went inward, not out into the world, to find a different way to sound.

Ultimately, it underscores everything that’s right with Supreme Balloon--in the absence of any larger narrative structure, the group’s latest album afford them the chance not to be modern theoreticians par excellence, but rather a couple of earnest music fans that convey their own passion through the sounds they create.

The real masterstroke of So It Goes is that it’s not: This is one for the here and now, as contemporary as New York hip-hop gets.

His lo-fi production values, traditional forms, and writerly sense of detail create songs that seem to recall moments from some collective past life, one that’s just barely disappeared from view.

It’s a record that is fine in its own right but is all the better for what it portends in the future.

Mostly Taiga is about sensation, playful and wild and smart but moving way too fast for contemplation.

This is a remarkable album, lovely but harrowing, meditative but visceral.

It's engineered, in a feature-article-friendly way, to embody its creator's personal development and comment on it in a way that's slick, weightless and easily disowned. For the first time in Marshall's career, lighter equals better

While aesthetically they are rather progressive (in indie rock or pop terms), conceptually and symbolically there is a lot lacking, and that this conflict drives a lot of what is interesting in their music.

They turn their wit into complex sentiments, making for an album that encompasses more than it delineates, even as the writing stays specific. Two voices don’t make for a proper community center, but they do make for something potent in a potentially bleak context.

Though there’s nothing here that’s particularly original or knock-you-flat outstanding, it’s all handled impeccably, recorded vividly, and sequenced smartly to make the album’s 38 minutes fly by.

Sisterworld includes mixtape-friendly stunners and make-it-stop agony in its cryptic commentary on the passive aggression of California. For that, it will get partisans who vouch for it as the best thing they’ve done, while others will declare it unfit to suckle the teat of Blixa Bargeld. It’s worth arguing about.

The band does what it does best, which is couch surreal oddity in unstoppable catchiness.

On seminal albums like Monster Movie and Tago Mago the songs flow and breathe in a very different way than the shortened pieces here. Those unfamiliar with Can would be wise to start with the albums, then come to this collection and enjoy the peculiar window it offers, which is full of fun surprises and brief snippets of Can’s genius. Fans, though, needn’t think about it before snapping up this necessary release.

It’s an old trick: happy music, sad words. But Quasi has elevated the strategy to an art form, and it’s nearly impossible to resist the sugar rush of the band’s sound in collision with Coomes’ black musings.

The songwriting and production are sharper and the scope is decidedly larger, capturing the band’s conflicting urge to play the introspective balladeer and the pub-crawling mod-rocker.

Final Summer is as sharp and exuberant and fierce as anything this band has ever done.

In the studio, it’s a totally different beast--a little soggy with orchestral coloring and the 24-track fuckery often seems rote. Taking St. Vincent at face value, Marry Me can be an enervating listen because Clark is playing against her strengths.

Until the Colours Run is a huge improvement, though: bigger, messier, louder and more transcendent. If you’re into Speck Mountain, The Besnard Lakes or No Joy, this one is worth a spin.

Though I Love You can at times appeal on an intellectual level more than an aesthetic one, it still has a host of admirable (and listenable) qualities.

The emphasis on songcraft here puts Menuck's vocal range in the spotlight. While he has some standout moments, notably a casual lamentation within "Kollapz Tradixional (Thee Olde Dirty Flag)" and a jagged shout on "Kollaps Tradicional (Bury 3 Dynamos)," his range isn't always up to the demands of the music.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

Heartbreaking Bravery is not an especially weird album, certainly not in comparison with Krug's other work, but it's alluring and intriguing all the same.

Revisiting the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but turning elements from one of their discography’s savage outliers into a competently turned-out, but not outstanding new chapter in the ongoing story of Wire hardly seems like the most ambitious thing they could have done with that material.

Lewis' strengths are primarily lyrical. The musical arrangements, though good enough not to distract, tend to disappear into the songs.

Though it may hardly win over detractors, there's not much of Made in the Dark that can be lambasted as puckish or precious.

It’s not often that music this loud and distorted can break your heart.

To Willie seems more like a personal effort than a proper follow-up to "Pride," and it’s not as inventive as that album. It works well as a covers collection.

With these five songs, The Fresh & Onlys have finally moved out of the garage for good.

It’s its own thing, and a pretty good one.

The majority of Friend Opportunity fails to surprise. While it’s an easily listenable disc not without its share of good and engaging tunes, for a band who have made some of the best and most confounding pop music of the last decade, it’s a bit of a letdown.

Human Animal is the most textured and abstract of the band’s “official” releases in years, and while perhaps their methods aren’t new, the results aren’t simply the same old Wolf Eyes.

The mix of instruments is fascinating, but the reason this music lingers is that it is just so beautiful. If you’ve enjoyed either artist in the past, prepare to love everything you loved before and add a little extra.

Blonde Redhead haven't run out of ideas, but Misery strips them of their eccentricities so thoroughly that the few that remain sound out of place.

We're on familiarly bleak and gloomy (although not entirely unironic) Tindersticks ground here and, in the case of this band, familiarity certainly doesn't breed contempt.

The pulse and stomp of opener “City of Angels” or the sparkling twilight balladry of “Misery Remember Me” are classic examples of what Ladytron has always done well and why it’s good to have them back. Especially on the back half of Time’s Arrow, though, there are some new wrinkles.

The squalling sax that wends its way through most of these tracks and Josephine’s joyful, yet solidly unsettled yelps temporarily brings to mind a more professional and spacious Mika Miko, but that similarity mostly traces back to a common debt owed to Kleenex/LiLiPUT--all three bands make the ennui and alienation of second adolescence both incredibly vivid and, strangely, a lot of fun.

On this album, Schneider seems a bit torn between his task as a hook-writing pop musician and a seeming urge to rock a bit harder, with the added burden of being unable to put his toys down when he should.

It seems cliché to say that music works on a few different levels, but in the case of Relief, it's true.

While McCombs may not transcend his influences, his sense of...well, humor on Humor Risk does set him apart from the current crop of guitar-based musicians that wallow in the dour and faux-clever.

You could miss whole philosophies by following the guitar line too closely…and forgo featherbeds of tuneful pleasures by worrying too much about the words. And yet, ride the line just right, and meaning floods translucently simple songs, lighting them up from inside and transforming them.

The recording shows little evidence of how acoustically challenging the glass-walled structure can be; every element registers clearly so that the music yields where it needs to and slams where it must. And slam it does, with big beats and massed choruses that bring the messages down hard and certain.

Over its brief 26 minutes the songs crest and fall within a fairly narrow band, and when one feels like it’s about to peak and explode, the group instead will pull back a bit. There are shifts and changes aplenty, and there’s certainly no risk of tedium, but this is a reserved set of songs nonetheless.

It's a given that Excellent Italian Greyhound is a masterful offering of jagged minimalist rock from a seasoned and almost ridiculously venerable band, but its mastery is expressed in exclusively expected ways.

Brown addresses alienation, identity, the lure of the spectacle, religion but she does so with an oblique approach to words that mirrors Drahla’s approach to their music. If this all sounds very serious be assured that Useless Connections is an album that, above all, rocks.

The merging of the two artists’ sounds feels entirely natural.

Saltbreakers is a wonderful album – a little glossy on the surface maybe, but saved from preciousness by its intelligence, restraint and soaring images.

It's a beautiful collection of 'water music' that also serves as a reminder that experimentation often works best when smuggled in, sidereal style, under the canvas cover of pop songs.

Malkmus has the same fractured pop sensibility, but his music is more expansive than it’s been before.

Though these may succeed as pop songs, Belle & Sebastian ultimately subvert their appeal by contradicting precious, self-effacing sentiments with brash music.

The album’s biggest weakness lies in its arrangements.

This album’s austerity puts it more in the ranks of bizarro reduxes like Scott Walker’s The Drift. That’s impressive company, but even with its slight runtime, it’s hard to imagine feeling compelled to come back to I’m New Here once you’ve understood what’s going on.

Much of Real Gone has been stripped so bare instrumentally that its heavy accumulation of rhythmic noise -- manipulated groans and grunts (“Metropolitan Glide”) what sounds like a cracking horsewhip (“Don’t Go Into The Barn”) -- establishes a sustained, bristling mood that electrifies particular songs but bogs down the album as a whole.

This album's problem is a very, very shoddy sequence.

This is what makes Earthquake Glue such a startling arrival. You don’t simply listen to it out of obligation, but instead because you are compelled to return to it, again and again.

The Broken String, fails to arouse--the sound is homey, the playing facile and the lyrics keen but not overly precious.

It's clear that none of these songs really require amplification, that they, in fact, drive the beauty of Diamond Mine. Still, Hopkins's deft touch somehow adds to, rather than subtracts from, their elemental simplicity

From its start, Audience of One diverges starkly from the expected; by its end, the sense of surprise is replaced by that of satisfaction.

Perlas is a lovely, understated album, sure in its stride but happy to wander, and somehow peaceable and playful, even as the songs hymn broken hearts.

This Dreamless Sleep, is often beautiful, but short on such surprises, and it becomes a bit of a snooze as a result.

Skullsplitter is ultimately that: comforting, even more so than it is odd.

It meanders stylistically all over the map, but unites all those styles in a pounding, obliterating “Bristol Road Leads to Dachau”-style drum beat that punches you right in the soft tissues.

The Body’s use of nearly-subsonic bass and samples puts these now commonplace building blocks of electronic dance music to their most infernal purposes. If there is something unsettling about an extended, windshield-rattling electronic kick drum, The Body has found it and perfected it.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

There are songs that seamlessly slip onto your mental shelf for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists--the music-hall-nodding “Can’t Go Back,” moody, politically-aware “William Weld in the 21st Century,” Lizzy-raising “Run to the City,” nostalgic, Billy-Bragg-ish “Lonsdale Avenue” (which first surfaced via The Both, Leo’s project with Aimee Mann)--but there are also some very interesting diversions.

The second half of the album mixes up longer, quieter intervals of unreality (“The Healer,” “Walking Again” “I Can Still See”) with more bangers (“Swampland” “Red Eyes”), and packs less of a wallop than the onset. Yet there is no question that 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is more like Ubu’s earliest material than anything Thomas has put out in years